Rather than give you my take on what Joe wrote, I am providing the reader with his entire post below:

Health insurance status and workers’ comp

The headlines were comforting – not much change in the number of Americans without health insurance.

Before you breathe that sigh of relief, you’d be well-advised to dig a bit deeper, because there’s plenty of bad news just under the headline.

While the national number of uninsured stayed about the same, that’s irrelevant to you – because healthcare is local. Here’s what I’d be worried about.

Young adults are almost twice as likely as older adults to be uninsured – about one in six younger adults don’t have coverage.

Takeaway – no health insurance = more incentive to file work comp claims

Over a quarter of working-age Texans don’t have coverage. Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina are not far behind

Takeaway – no health insurance = poorer health status, more comorbidities, more charity care for providers thus more incentive to cost- and claim-shift.

44% of working-age adults were covered by high-deductible plans – but more than half of them don’t have health savings accounts needed to fund those high deductibles

Takeaway – “High” deductible health plans aren’t much different than no insurance at all if the patient can’t afford the deductible – and over half can’t. So, more incentive to cost- and claim-shift.

What does this mean for you?

Workers’ comp will be affected by the Administration’s ongoing behind-the-scene effort to hollow out the ACA and cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid.

But what it also means it that single payer will be the only way every American can be assured of access to health care that is affordable and available when they need it, and is not a luxury they can do without,

It may also mean that the workers’ comp silo may have to be folded once and for all into the health care silo that will cover the elderly, the poor, children, the military and their families, and everyone else not currently covered under any insurance, or under employer-sponsored insurance, which would be done away with.

So, Joe gave us an unintended gift by showing how health insurance status and workers’ comp may lead to the implementation of single payer health care.

A report issued Monday by Milliman indicated that the cost of health care for a typical American family covered by the average employer-sponsored preferred provider organization (PPO) plan in 2018 is $28,166, as per the Milliman Medical Index (MMI).

Broken down into component parts, this represents the following costs:

2018 MMI Components of Spending

31% ($8,631) – Inpatient

19% ($5,395) – Outpatient

29% ($8,275) – Professional services

17% ($4,888) – Pharmacy

4% ($995) – Other (Home health, ambulance, DME, prosthetics)

The key takeaway from the report is that employers are paying more; but employees are paying a lot more.

The health care expenditures are funded by employer contributions to health plans and by employees through their payroll deductions and out-of-pocket expenses incurred when care is received, according to the report.

The report continues that they are seeing over the long-term, and that employees are paying a higher percentage of the total, with employee expenses increasing 5.9%, and employer expenses increasing 3.5% in 2018.

The total cost of health care is shared by both the employer and employee for a family of four, the MMI stated, which breaks down to three categories:

1. Employer subsidy. Employers that sponsor health plans subsidize the cost of healthcare for their employees by allocating compensation dollars to pay a large share of the cost.

2. Employee contribution. Employees who choose to participate in the employer’s health benefit plan typically also pay a substantial portion of costs, usually through payroll deduction.

3. Employee out-of-pocket cost at time of service. When employees receive care, they also often pay for a portion of these services via health plan deductibles and/or point-of-service copays.

The relative proportions of medical costs for 2018 are:

56% ($15,788) – Employer contribution

27% ($7,674) – Employee contribution

17% ($4,704) – Employee out-of-pocket

Looking at this another way, employees are paying a total of 44% as either a contribution or out-of-pocket, which adds up to $12,378, compared to the employers’ 56% and $15,788, respectively.

As health care gets more expensive, it will naturally lead to higher costs for employers, but also higher costs for employees. And as has been happening more commonly, employers are shifting more of the costs onto the employees. With stagnant wages, as reported daily in the news, this is going to be a problem for those families caught in the squeeze between rising costs for medical care and stagnant wages.

This would be resolved by creating a single payer health care system that will save both employers and employees money,

The proletarianization of physicians marches on. As you recall from my reviews of “Health Care under the Knife”, there has been a steady movement towards making physicians into employees of hospitals, or rather their proletarianization. Now it seems they are up against noncompetes, as the article below reports.

Here is the link to the article:

Legal experts say noncompete agreements are common practice for hospitals, and are usually enforceable. But physicians, and in some cases the courts, are pushing back.

As readers of this blog have noticed in the past, I have been very critical of CMS’ introduction of myriads of models, programs, and schemes to improve quality reporting and physician performance, so it is no surprise that I look upon this new initiative with a bit of skepticism. But I’ll let you the reader decide if this is just another wasted effort by CMS or if it has a chance to actually work this time. After all, after forty years of tinkering, the American health care system is no better off than it was before CMS got involved.

One of the quality networks CMS wants to roll into a single contract concerns something your humble writer is going through, ESRD.

Here’s the article:

Quality Improvement Networks and Organizations, End Stage Renal Disease Networks and Hospital Improvement Innovation Networks are all being bundled into a single $25 billion contract.

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– Unknown

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– Thomas Carlyle

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– President Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

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– Theodore Roosevelt, 1908

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“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

– Karl Marx

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– Socrates

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– Arthur Schopenhauer

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– Robin Williams

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– John Stuart Mill

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– Woodrow Wilson

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“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health [care] is the most shocking and inhuman[e]…”